MITPressLog

Sidewalk Culture

Our own sidewalk scholars, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht, have been pounding the pavement tracking the furious battles that have been fought on sidewalks over free speech, public access and conflicting uses. In their new book, Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space, reveals the policies governing sidewalks in five cities — Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Miami and Seattle — to explain why some cities have a vibrant sidewalk culture and in other cities, sidewalks are devoid of life.

Loukaitou-Sideris sat down with UCLA Today to talk about it.  Here's a taste. 

What first intrigued you about sidewalks?

Coming from Athens, Greece, where there is a very intensive use of sidewalks, I experienced a cultural shock when I first came to this country in 1983 as a graduate student and saw that sidewalks were empty in most places. This was so much in contrast to my own life experiences. I always had this question: Why are American sidewalks empty? What happened to the pedestrians? The book really responds to these questions.

 

What American cities do the best job of promoting sidewalk-walking?

East coast cities have a longer history of mixed use. Having mixed uses – where, for example, supermarkets occupy the ground floor of a building and apartments are on the upper floors — brings more people onto the streets. Boston and New York have more interesting sidewalks because they have many more mixed-use buildings and shorter blocks. But in western cities, you'll see endless subdivisions, established by zoning. It's helped create what we call the "dormitory" suburb. This has taken the life out of sidewalks. There are even some suburbs that have been built without sidewalks because homeowners want their privacy.

Read more here.  And remember, don't step on a crack..... 

Why did Kanye grab the mic? Dan Wegner explains it all for you.

Everyone from Jay-Z to President Obama has weighed in on Kanye West's controversial interruption of Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at last weekend's MTV Video Music Awards. But we're sure that some of you, our thoughtful and highly intelligent readers, won't be satisfied until you get the nuts-and-bolts philosophical-psychological perspective on the incident. Right? Right?

Wait no longer, friends. Over on the Psychology Today blog The Natural Unconscious, John Bargh, who teaches psychology and cognitive science at Yale, dissects Kanye's explanation for the break-in, which, when he was on Jay Leno, he attributed not to his own actions but to the pain caused by his mother's death. (Which happened in 2007, but let that go for the moment.) The problem, as Bargh sees it, starts with the question of free will and causality, and that's where our own Dan Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will comes in. Dan argued in that book that we do not have access to our own information about our causal influence on the world. That is, as Bargh puts it, "we can't use just our feelings of having caused our behavior as some kind of prima facie evidence that we did indeed cause it."

Thus, Bargh continues:

[West] did not take personal responsibility for what he had done, but instead apologized that "his own pain caused someone else's pain". He was saying, in other words, that he did not intend his behavior, he did not freely choose it, but instead it was caused by the understandable pain he still felt over the loss of his mother.

Now, Mr West has been roundly criticized in the media for not taking personal responsibility for his own actions and trying to focus the public's attention on his own suffering and not the embarrassment and humiliation he caused Ms Swift. But we should realize that his sudden, and quite convenient abandonment of his own presumed belief in free will, is something we all tend to do, although usually not on the Jay Leno show in front of 30 million viewers.

Once again, scholarship rides to the rescue of pop culture. Read the whole thing here.

Posthumous Publications

Ernest Hemingway's A Movable Feast, Sylvia Plath's Ariel, Jonathan Kennedy O'Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, and more recently, Robert Bolano's 2666 were all published after the authors had passed away.

An article in today's Wall Street Journal highlights posthumous publications and brings attention to the often fraught process of assembling literature from notebooks and computer files. With many forthcoming posthumous publications, what are you looking forward to reading? What are some of your favorite posthumously published books?

Chris Payne talks Asylum at GSAAP

Photographer Christopher Payne will discuss his new book, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals at Inquiry:HP, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation's Historic Preservation Lecture Series.  The event is tonight at 6:30: Avery Hall, 6th Floor, Ware Classroom on Columbia's Morningside Campus. If you are in the area, be sure to check it out. 

Olga Amsterdamska (1953-2009)

We note with sadness the passing of our author Olga Amsterdamska on August 27. Olga taught at the University of Amsterdam, most recently in the department of sociology and anthropology, and was the coeditor of the third edition of The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. Here is an except from one of her contributions thereto:

The directive to study practices has widened the range of places where STS scholars now look when studying the production of scientific knowledge.From a practice perspective, every diagnostic or treatment decision by a doctor, every choice of policy by a government regulatory agency, and every user's attempt to master a new technology can be seen as part of the process of knowledge production...[A]s many essays in other sections of this Handbook testify, much justified attention has in recent years come to settle on actors who are not scientists and on areas of activity where scientific knowledge, technological know-how, and research are made to intersect with other knowledges, skills, and tasks...The chapters in this section do not share a common theory, or even a common definition of practice, but a family a resemblance and a set of problems that might be a good place from which to continue thinking about science.

Amsterdamska leaves her husband, Gene Moore of the University of Amsterdam, and two daughters, to whom we send our condolences.

Akbar Ganji Opposes Recognition of Iranian President at UN General Assembly

This week, world leaders will meet in New York City for the annual UN General Assembly.  Among the attendees is Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Following June 12th hotly contested election where many believe he was elected after stealing several million votes, many Iranians reject his leadership and oppose any meeting or recognition of Ahmadinejad, especially by President Obama.

Among them is Iranian dissident and pro-democracy activist, Akbar Ganji.  He commented on Ahmadinejad's visit and the situation in Iran today on CNN this morning.  Here's a taste:

Today, the people of Iran are in need of the moral and spiritual support from people around the world. In the current circumstances the most important form of support would be to assist with the campaign of charging the leaders of Iran with "crimes against humanity" and to help disseminate this initiative so that it becomes the main avenue of engagement with Iran by the international community.

We are seeking to place this issue at the top of the international agenda so that leaders of the Iranian regime will think twice before traveling abroad as well as to make it morally unacceptable for leaders of democratic countries to extend a hand to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

We'll see what happens later this week and watch for Ganji's views on how the meetings went.  For more on his call for universal human rights and democracy based on our common humanity, check out The Road to Democracy in Iran. 

Argh! A Philosophical Look at Pirates

Avast!  "Talk Like a Pirate Day" is upon us once again. There are activities planned throughout the world to help you unleash your inner buckaneer, but we wanted to draw your attention to Daniel Heller-Roazen, a Princeton professor because he's been thinking about pirates too, albeit from a different, more philosophical, perspective.  In The Enemy of All, he looks at the pirate as the original enemy of humankind. As Cicero famously remarked, there are certain enemies with whom one may negotiate and with whom, circumstances permitting, one may establish a truce. But there is also an enemy with whom treaties are in vain and war remains incessant. This is the pirate, considered by ancient jurists to be "the enemy of all."  He reconstructs the shifting place of the pirate in legal and political thought from the ancient to the medieval, modern, and present world, outlining the philosophical genealogy of a remarkable antagonist.

Today, Heller-Roazen argues, the pirate furnishes the key to the contemporary paradigm of the universal foe. This is a legal and political person of exception, neither criminal nor enemy, who inhabits an extra-territorial region. Against such a foe, states may wage extraordinary battles, policing politics and justifying military measures in the name of welfare and security.

Shiver me timbers.

Happy Birthday to COBOL

COBOL, one of the most widely used programming languages, is also one of the safest and most trusted. There are said to be 200 times as many COBOL transactions performed each day as Google searches.

COBOL would not exist without the efforts of the "grandmother of COBOL", Admiral Grace Hopper. And 50 years ago today, she gave the name "COBOL" to this nascent computer language. Happy birthday to COBOL!

Grace Hopper, one of the first programmers, is credited with inventing the compiler, discovering the first software "bug", and is known for inventing spirited aphorisms such as "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission". More about the life of Grace Hopper can be found in Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, officially published today to honor the 50th anniversary of COBOL.

Top 100 Urban Thinkers

The votes are in for the 2009 top urban thinkers, a poll hosted by Planetizen. The field is wide and represents thinkers both contemporary and historical.

Leon Krier, scholar, architect, and urban designer made the top ten, coming in at number eight. His book, Drawing for Architecture, just came out this month.

Many other MIT Press authors and personalities made it onto the list. They include: Le Corbusier, Bucky Fuller, Manuel Castells, Frederick Law Olmstead, Peter M. Haas, and Walter Benjamin.

Award News: The Origins of Human Communication wins Maccoby Award

Michael Tomasello’s Origins of Human Communication (2008) was the recipient of this year’s Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology given by the Developmental Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association (APA).

The award was presented at the annual APA convention in August.

For more information, visit http://ecp.fiu.edu/APA/div7/?d=maccoby